


Lock and Key (With Friends Like These)

by lily_winterwood



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Codes & Ciphers, Escape, Gen, Lemony Snicket Narration, Mystery, Puzzles, whodunit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 07:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14208126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lily_winterwood/pseuds/lily_winterwood
Summary: Perhaps Yuuri’s still just a bit disoriented from earlier in the evening, but aren’t normal people who have been kidnapped by their creepy fan a lot more worried about things? Aren’t they more likely to be calling the police instead of solving riddles?That’s when he rummages through his pockets and realises his phone is nowhere on him. And that’s when he feels his heartbeat pick up against his ribcage.





	Lock and Key (With Friends Like These)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ayabai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayabai/gifts).



> This should have been done in time for April Fool’s. Hopefully it’s still a good read anyway!

The first thing Yuuri registers when he wakes up is the disturbingly cheery elevator music grating at his ears.

Well, that’s not precisely where the story starts, but for all intents and purposes that is where he is right now. Yuuri Katsuki wakes up to the sound of disturbingly cheery elevator music, gently filtering in through some unknown radio in a disturbingly cheery room.

The cheer is alleviated somewhat by the fact that he is chained by the ankle to the foot of a small bed in the corner of a wood-panelled room, but that’s neither here nor there.

Yuuri’s first instinct, of course, is to panic and search through his head for how this could have happened. One moment, he had been with his fiancé Viktor and their friends at a bar, drowning his anxieties with strong spirits (in many senses of the word), and the next thing he knows, he is chained to a bed in an unfamiliar room. After all, most people would panic at such a revelation.

But then a familiar face wanders into his line of sight, and Yuuri immediately collapses back onto the bed in obvious relief.

“Viktor,” he breathes. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

His fiancé, Viktor Nikiforov, smiles and kneels at the foot of the bed. “Yuuri! Thank god you’re alive,” he says, his eyes wide. “We’ve got to get out of here. Time’s running out!”

“Time?” echoes Yuuri. Viktor nods behind him, and Yuuri follows his gaze to see a timer clicking back from 58 minutes. Immediately — as people are wont to do when they realise something is actually timed, like a job or a test — Yuuri starts to panic harder, moving as if to escape from the bed. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get very far.

“Oh my god,” he says, half on the bed and half on the floor. “Is there some way I can get out of these chains?”

“I’m working on it, pig,” snaps another voice on the other end of the room. Yuuri looks, and sees Otabek Altin and Yuri Plisetsky bent over something on a handsomely-carved wooden desk. It’s almost the same shade as the wall panelling, giving off a distinct hunting-lodge atmosphere all around.

“There’s four locks in this room,” says Otabek, as Yuuri tries not to stare too hard at the replicas of too-familiar figure skating outfits adorning a set of flower-crowned mannequins by the desk. “I’m sure whatever’s in them will help us get out of here in time.”

“How did I — how did I get in here?” Yuuri asks, jangling his chain. His wrist bumps up against the onigiri pillow that he had been using as a headrest prior to waking up, and he grabs it to clutch to his chest. “Why am I the only one who’s tied up?”

“Because we’ve all gotten out of ours,” replies Yuri, rolling his eyes. “Oh, this letter’s easy.”

Thanks to his sister, Yuuri’s watched a lot of horror movies, including the entire oeuvre of Takashi Miike. (He was a bit scarred after that.) And he’s pretty sure most people who say something is ‘easy’ — be it a fellow character, or some puzzle set by the main antagonist — usually end up dead.

But nothing has jutted out of the walls to murder Yuri yet, so they seem to be safe still. “What does it say?” Yuuri asks.

In response, Viktor crosses the room to peer over Yuri and Otabek’s shoulders. “It’s a love letter!” he exclaims. “And it’s for you, how _odd_!”

“For… for me?” asks Yuuri bemusedly. Yuri makes a retching sound.

“Yeah, it’s for you, though I don’t know what’d possess someone to do something like that,” he grouses. “You wanna read it?”

“Please,” replies Yuuri, so Yuri comes over and shoves the letter in his face:

> D3AR YUURI
> 
> W0RDS CANNOT DESCRIBE THE 4MOUNT OF LOVE I HAVE 4 YOU. THE EMBERS OF MY HEART W1LL ALWAYS SPARK INTO FLAME IN YOUR PRESENCE.
> 
> I REMAIN, YOUR OBEDIENT 5ERVANT,
> 
> ANONYMOUS ADMIRER

Yuuri swallows when he finishes reading it, taking the paper and frowning at the words. _Anonymous Admirer_. The newsprint clippings. He’s certain he’s never seen anything like this outside of bad thriller movies. Phichit would probably appreciate it.

Where _is_ Phichit, anyway? Yuuri racks his brains, trying to remember what had happened earlier in the evening. Phichit had been at the bar, too, talking about a game of some sort. They must be missing it now. He doesn’t know what time it is, besides the time counting down on the clock nearby.

Right, if he wants to see Phichit again, he has to get out.

“Some of those letters are numbers,” Yuuri notes. “Those numbers probably unlock something, right?”

There’s a click of a lock. “Well, duh,” says Yuri, twitching out of Viktor’s way. “Hey, watch where you’re going, baldy!”

“Sorry, excuse me,” retorts Viktor. To Yuuri’s confusion, his fiancé starts crawling all over the room in search of something. It’s not the first time Yuuri looks at him and is reminded of their dog instead — Viktor is diligently turning out unlocked drawers and boxes and items of clothing in the room in a way reminiscent of Makkachin on the hunt for snacks.

He’s startled out of his thoughts by the click of the lock on the chains confining his ankle. Yuri straightens up, sporting both the key and a frown. “Now,” he asks drily, “are you actually going to be helpful in getting us out of here before your crazy fan comes back?”

“My crazy fan?” echoes Yuuri as he gets up off of the bed, rubbing gingerly at the skin

“Yeah,” says Yuri, shoving a manila folder at Yuuri. “The wacko who stuck us in here in the first place.”

Yuuri opens the folder, and examines each page. There’s a short dossier on each of the six suspects, accompanied by rather unfortunately-rendered police sketches:

> **A NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF SUSPECTS:**
> 
> Major Mike Nini — An Army Major with decades of military experience and a ruthless streak. He would stop at nothing to obtain his objectives.
> 
> Fiovrick Von Rito — A florist with questionable business ties, perhaps to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, perhaps to the Tambov gang. He has, of course, denied all connections to these organisations.
> 
> Kiti ‘Pussy’ Ryle — A burlesque dancer who had the same instructors as Katsuki. Her catlike grace and love of disguise allows her to blend into the crowd wherever she goes.
> 
> Hestia Circe Hemp-Giotto — A psychic with a deep affinity for nature who may or may not be an accomplice of Von Rito. If she is, she may have also taken this opportunity to one-up her former master.
> 
> Jake R. Lancejoy — A Professor of Medieval Studies at Oxford, but he has been known to smuggle artefacts out of digs and excavations.
> 
> Elane Mikol — A cinematographer travelling with a documentary film crew. She once interviewed Katsuki’s coach for a documentary on famous Italian skaters.

“I’ve never seen these people in my life,” Yuuri repeats, closing the folder. This is not a lie — he has, for one, never seen an army major with an eyepatch and a scar, or an Oxford professor with a monocle, or a burlesque dancer that looks less like an actual dancer and more like a caricaturist’s concept of a noir film starlet. “How are any of them my fans?”

After all, normal people don’t have an entire lineup of Cluedo suspects for fans. There _has_ to be something off about that.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Yuri, shrugging. “One of them did this to us, and we have to get out before they come back.”

“Can… can we tell who did it?” wonders Yuuri, perusing each page again.

“I’m just surprised it wasn’t Viktor, honestly,” replies Yuri.

Viktor puts on a look of mock offense. “How could it have been me? I’m right here, aren’t I?” he demands, clutching at a string of nonexistent pearls. “Why would I go to all that trouble of kidnapping you three and locking myself in the same room with you? That seems counter-intuitive.”

“So you’re not fazed by the fact that the pig has a fan who’s creepily dedicated to him,” deadpans Yuri.

“I’m offended,” retorts Viktor, “because any self-respecting fan of Yuuri’s should know better than to kidnap him, or even people who look vaguely like him. That’s a crime and it should be punished.”

Yuri’s eyes narrow. “You sound like you’re projecting,” he remarks.

“Banish the thought,” retorts Viktor, and winks.

Yuuri sighs, the conversation having shed absolutely no light on his situation whatsoever. The way Viktor had talked about the suspects should be ringing some sort of alarm bell, but when his brain is always ringing alarm bells for situations that don’t require it, the fatigue does tend to set in sooner. “Maybe it’s the army major?” he suggests.

“I bet it was ‘Pussy’,” Viktor says cheerily, tossing a flower crown onto the table. Yuuri’s not quite sure where he’d gotten those. “Kiti Ryle seems suspicious to me.”

“You just say that because she’s described like a cat,” sneers Yuri. “I bet it was Jake R. Lancejoy. If he’s been smuggling stuff out of digs, he definitely could smuggle us into this creepy… whatever this is.”

“Hunting lodge?” wonders Viktor, flipping through a pile of paper scraps in his hands. “All it’s missing are antlers.”

Yuuri shivers a little. “I don’t — I don’t know if that’s comforting at all.”

“The clock,” warns Otabek. Viktor pulls out one final scrap of paper from between two books, before heading to the nightstand by the bed with all of the pieces he’d scavenged.

Yuuri kneels down next to him by the nightstand and starts to rearrange the scraps. The first one, which had already been lying on the nightstand, contains one corner of what appears be a note.

“Dear Yuuri, I remember most brilliantly the night we first met… it’s another love letter,” Viktor says thoughtfully as he pieces the letter together. “Should I be jealous?”

“I’ve — I don’t know who this person is,” says Yuuri as the note slowly morphs into something intelligible out of the heap of paper scraps. A chill runs down his spine as he looks at the the handwriting, which for some reason looks oddly familiar…

His thoughts are interrupted again by Yuri. “We’ve wasted ten minutes already,” the blond grumbles, “and there’s still three more things to unlock.”

“Maybe we can work on the mannequins?” wonders Otabek. Yuuri looks back to see the two of them contemplating a locked hatbox at the foot of the mannequins. One of them is wearing his free skate outfit, the other one —

“There’s something wrong with the Eros outfit,” Yuuri notes, frowning at the crystals beaded in careful rows across the chest of the leotard. “You can see the original in the poster next to the silhouette of the dog, right?”

“There’s crystals missing,” agrees Otabek, already comparing the two. Yuuri turns back to Viktor, who has finally finished piecing the letter back together, and hums.

“Strange spelling,” he says, pointing at some of the words on the letter.

Viktor nods. “Yes, that’s what I was thinking — there’s a missing ‘m’ in ‘remember’.

“Maybe those missing letters were taken out on purpose,” Yuuri points out, as he reads:

> DEAR YUURI
> 
> I REMEBER MOST BRILLIANTLY THE NIGHT WE FIRST MET. YOU WERE BRIGHTER THN ALL THE STARS IN THE SY. WE DANCED FOR WHAT FELT LIE AN ETERNITY AND I COULD NOT BEAR TO PART WITH YOU AFTER. NOW I SHALL NEVER HVE TO.
> 
> YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT,
> 
> ANONYMOUS ADMIRER

“That must unlock this combination lock,” Yuuri finishes as he turns the dials on the lock in question. “It’s only got letters.”

Viktor beams as the lock on the nightstand clicks open and they detach it to reveal a drawer bearing a small USB stick. “That’s so clever, Yuuri!” he exclaims, kissing him on the cheek. “I bet Chri —” but he catches himself, and Yuuri raises an eyebrow.

“Chris?” he echoes? “Where is he? And Phichit, too, for that matter.”

Viktor flushes. “I have no idea,” he says. Yuuri privately thinks his fiancé is a terrible liar, but he smiles and looks over at where Otabek and Yuri are working on the mannequins.

“The crystals are missing in a specific pattern,” Otabek calls. “The first crystal in the row is missing, and then it skips to the ninth, and then the ninth again, and then the seventh.”

“The hatbox lock has five spots,” says Yuri. “Wait, but the second row has nothing missing.”

“Perfect.” Otabek is already undoing the lock. “What was in your box, Yuuri?”

“A flash drive,” says Yuuri. “There’s nothing in here that would need that, though.”

“We’ll see,” replies Otabek, as he opens up the hatbox. The four of them crowd around the contents: a small portable speaker, as well as an even smaller key.

“That’s for the diary lock,” Viktor says, immediately crossing over to the opposite wall, where there is a tall bookshelf filled with books on all sorts of subjects. And had the clock not been firmly set with forty minutes left to go, Yuuri would have liked to sit down and peruse the titles. As it is, he focuses solely on the book Viktor had pulled out from the shelf, watching as his fiancé unlocks the diary with the little key and rifles through the pages.

Simultaneously, Otabek presses a key on the speaker, and the room is suddenly filled with the sound of tapping. Even the grating elevator music seems to dampen down a little, so that they could hear the taps.

Taps, of course, can mean many things. It could be measuring out the beat of a song or the rhythm of a dancer. It could indicate the boredom of someone in line at the barber’s, the presence of a potentially unwanted visitor, or —

“Morse code,” says Viktor, holding up a card he’d gotten out of the back of the diary. “That message is in morse code.”

“How would you know?” demands Yuri. Viktor waves the card, before playing the recording again. This time, the tapping seems to take on a more noticeable pattern.

“What does it say?” asks Yuri, as Otabek takes the card from Viktor and starts to transcribe the taps.

“You know morse code?” asks Yuuri, impressed, as Otabek writes down the taps on a blank page in the diary.

“I was interested in cryptography when I was kid,” replies Otabek, stepping back and and giving the card to Yuri for him to check:

[.--. --- - -.-- .-](https://morsecode.scphillips.com/cgi-bin/message.cgi?m=eJxjZBARYQjwD4l0BAAF-wG3)

“What does my cat have to do with it?” wonders Yuri, his brows furrowing. Yuuri frowns as well, as he’s not entirely sure why some deranged fan of his would care about another Yuri’s cat.

“Maybe that’s a clue for who the fan might be,” Viktor remarks, tapping at his chin as he looks back at the clock. It’s just wound down to 30 minutes, and they still have no idea how to escape. The elevator music is back with a vengeance now, irritating Yuuri’s ears in a way reminiscent of a rusty cheese grater trying to shave expired Parmesan.

“Well, if the diary was on the bookshelf, then maybe the Potya clue has something to do with the books,” he says, wandering closer to the bookshelf. “There’s a book on cats in here.”

Otabek takes out the book, flips around in it. “The pages are blank,” he announces.

“Weird,” says Yuuri. “Usually books about a subject have pages dedicated to that subject.”

“Some of these books might be decoys,” replies Yuri, pulling down a couple more books. “ _Horses_ has nothing in it. Neither does _World War Two_ , or _Crime Scene Investigation for the Armchair Sleuth_.”

The situation is becoming more and more bizarre by the minute, though probably the strangest thing is how readily the others seem to accept that. Viktor flips through the manila folder again, while Otabek and Yurio go through the book titles on the shelf.

“There’s a book on pumas, tigers, and scorpions,” says Otabek suddenly. “Isn’t that what Potya’s full name is?”

“All in one book?” asks Yuuri, raising an eyebrow. After all, there are very few things pumas, tigers, and scorpions have in common with one another, besides being potentially dangerous animals which have occasionally featured on the logo of some brands. All three of them being in the same book together, without mentions of other animals in between, seems extremely odd.

Yuri tugs at the book, and the bookshelf swings in to reveal another room.

* * *

Whatever bright cheeriness had existed in the previous room fades immediately upon crossing the threshold into this one, which clearly seems to be the lair of the rabid fan. Here the wooden panelling gives way to an ugly floral-patterned wallpaper, while the elevator music gives way to the chilling hiss of an air conditioner on overdrive. As a burst of cold air hits him, Yuuri shivers and rubs at the goosebumps rising on his forearms.

“How many locks?” he asks.

“Three,” says Otabek. “There’s… there’s a lot of flowers in here. And flower crowns.”

“That narrows down the suspect list considerably, doesn’t it?” asks Viktor, thumbing through the dossier. “Only two people on this list would have so many flowers.”

Yuuri shivers again, but not from the cold. There’s a box of leftover takeout cooling on the table by the armchair, and an entire wall full of news clippings and maps of Hasetsu pinned over the wallpaper. The level of detail this fan has taken is incredibly astounding.

“Look, a peephole!” says Viktor, pointing to a hole in the wall next to all of the clippings and maps. Yuuri can see through the open door that it’s right where the mirror is in the other room, hovering just above the bed that he had been chained to. Bending over the peephole, he looks through right at the dog silhouette on the opposite wall.

“There’s numbers,” he says, unable to shake the feeling that this is all too convenient. Why would any self-respecting skater-napper leave answers lying so easily within their grasp? Was it all just a game? Did the others know something he didn’t and are content to just unlock every box along the way instead of actually trying to get out of the place?

Perhaps he’s still just a bit disoriented from earlier in the evening, but aren’t normal people who have been kidnapped by their creepy fan a lot more worried about things? Aren’t they more likely to be calling the police instead of solving riddles?

That’s when he rummages through his pockets and realises his phone is nowhere on him. And that’s when he feels his heartbeat pick up against his ribcage.

“What are the numbers?” Otabek asks. Yuuri takes a couple deep breaths.

“23259,” he reads.

“There’s a box with a dog silhouette on it,” notes Yuri. “I’ll bet you anything that those numbers will unlock that box.”

“And you’d be correct,” replies Otabek, to the sound of a lock clicking open. He reaches into the box, pulling out a small dog collar as well as a photograph of a castle.

Viktor takes the collar. “It says Vicchan,” he says, his eyes shining. “Is this really Vicchan’s collar, Yuuri?”

Yuuri feels as if he’d been doused in cold water. “Vicchan’s collar should be…” he takes the collar from Viktor, hefting it in his hands. “This one looks too new, but it’s a close replica. Why would anyone want to —”

“Replicate Vicchan’s collar?” finishes Viktor. He shrugs. “This fan’s pretty dedicated, aren’t they?”

Yuuri frowns. “You seem really… okay about this,” he says, stepping closer to Viktor under the pretext of looking at the picture. “Aren’t you interested in getting out?”

“ _I_ am,” Yuri cuts in from where he’s poring over the news clippings plastered to one of the other walls, next to another safe with a keypad. “We’ve got twenty minutes left to get out of here, so stop flirting, you two.”

Yuuri feels his cheeks burn. “We weren’t —” he begins, but Yuri is poking through the clippings again, clearly oblivious to his protests.

At this point the others are definitely viewing this more as a game than anything actually serious, which only makes the confusion swirl deeper in his gut.

“Why me?” he asks, kneeling down to look at the third box — the largest one, with a combination dial. There’s a 2016 calendar hanging over it, with several dates marked with various symbols. Circles, triangles, squares, hearts — he notices, with a jolt, that there’s a heart around his birthday.

There’s also a note on the calendar to ‘cross-reference’ the dates, which Yuuri of course takes to mean finding another object that stores dates and checking the dates with one another. Which therefore means he wanders back into the other room to grab the diary and flip through the pages until he gets to November 29th, 2016.

As expected, there’s a key next to the date, which is also marked with a heart. So Yuuri turns the dial to 11, and then to 29, and then to 16, and exhales as the door to the safe swings open.

“There’s a whole bunch of different numbers on this one.” Yuri sighs in exasperation from where he’s examining the newspaper clippings. “All of them are about piggy’s record-breaking free skate.”

“Which numbers have you tried?” asks Viktor.

“The dates on each of them, the final scores, the technical and presentation scores… the piggy’s age…” Yuri rubs at his forehead. “How much time left?”

“Ten,” says Otabek, peering in from the other room. Yuuri takes a deep breath and pulls out the laptop contained in the safe, opening it to a login page.

“I need a password,” he says.

“Try the score,” says Viktor, peering over Yuri’s shoulder.

“I tried the scores,” grumbles Yuri.

“The record-breaking free skate score?”

Yuri curses. He then plugs in those numbers, and curses harder when the lock opens. “Seven minutes,” he mutters, before pulling out the photograph lying within and bringing it over to Yuuri.

Yuuri blinks at it. “It’s a picture of me and Vicchan,” he remarks. “But I don’t remember posing with a flower crown for that.”

“Collect all the flower crowns,” says Yuri, and Otabek nods. He and Viktor start to dig through all the available nooks and crannies, even going back into the other room to grab the other flower crowns in there.

“I need the one with the bright gold ribbon,” Yuuri says, holding up the photograph to the light coming in from the other room. “And it’s got pink flowers, then blue, then deep purple, then two different kinds of pink flowers, then —”

“I got it!” Viktor announces triumphantly. He brings the circlet into the room, dropping it in Yuuri’s lap. Otabek brings in a book marked with different kinds of flowers as well.

“This could help,” he says. Yuuri nods, taking the crown and looking at the white flowers on one end.

“These are myrtles,” he says, nodding towards the bucket where several other sprigs of the flowers reside. “What does myrtle mean?”

“The word ‘home’ is circled in the entry,” says Otabek.

“The next one is ivy geranium,” replies Yuuri.

“The,” says Otabek. A pause. “The word ‘the’ is circled,” he explains. “It actually means ‘your hand for the next dance’, apparently.”

“What about hellebore?” asks Yuri, pointing to the next one.

“Scandal, but ‘and’ is the only bit circled,” replies Otabek. “What’s next?

“Dog rose?”

“Dog is circled, but the meaning is pleasure and pain,” says Viktor, peering over Otabek’s shoulder. “You know, if you cared about that sort of thing.” He winks, and Yuuri flushes.

“Ugh, get a room,” mutters Yuri. Yuuri flushes harder.

“Ivy geranium again, so that’s ‘the’,” he says, before sighing. “What about ambrosia?”

“Your love is reciprocated, emphasis on ‘is’,” says Viktor.

“Forget-me-nots?”

“Key to my heart, emphasis on ‘key’,” replies Viktor.

“And ivy geranium again.” Yuuri looks up. “Home the and dog the —”

“We got it backwards,” interrupts Yuri, turning the circlet around. “The key is the dog and the home.”

Viktor snaps his fingers. “The laptop password,” he says immediately.

“Five minutes,” warns Otabek.

“So by home — hometown?” asks Yuuri.

“Hasetsu, right?” asks Viktor. “Vicchanhasetsu?”

“That’s too many letters,” Yuuri reports, as the laptop beeps irritably at him. “Vicchan is a nickname, though, so —”

He types in ‘victorhasetsu’, and the login screen immediately blares ‘welcome’ at him.

“You need the USB stick,” remarks Yuri, passing the flash drive over. Yuuri plugs it in, pulling up the folder contents. It contains just one thing: a video file titled ‘instructions’. Yuuri clicks play.

The resolution is monochromatic and fuzzy, like most security footage. However, it’s also obviously of this room — to be precise, of the chunk of wall just next to all of the news clippings about Yuuri. There’s still a patch of wallpaper visible there, and a hooded figure approaches it with the onigiri pillow from the other room, pressing it against one of the squares.

Viktor has already grabbed the onigiri, and is pressing against all of the exposed patches of flower wallpaper on that segment of wall. In the other room, the clock ticks down to the last minute, and the hum of the air conditioning sends shivers down Yuuri’s spine.

Well, either the hum or the chill, though at this point it’s hard to tell which came first.

Viktor makes a sudden ‘aha’ noise and presses down with the plush on a patch of wall, which causes the door to swing open. Moments later, claps and cheers come drifting in from outside, and Yuuri bemusedly follows Viktor out into the hall to meet the broad grins of Phichit and Christophe.

* * *

“You got through it! You escaped the room!” Phichit exclaims. Yuuri blinks owlishly at the bright fluorescent lights of the hallway, at the phone camera that’s pointed at his face.

There’s only one word that could completely encapsulate the feeling of having wandered through two rooms full of puzzles dedicated to him, under the guise of trying to escape the clutches of some unknown fan. This word has also come in handy in other situations, such facing down one’s own childhood idol in a hot spring, or trying to retrieve one’s fiancé from the roof of a castle where he has been doing extremely naked yoga.

“ _What_ ,” says Yuuri. The ‘the fuck’ goes without saying.

“We set up this room for you guys!” Christophe replies, still cheerily recording on his phone as Yuri and Otabek high-five one another for escaping in the nick of time. “Viktor wanted to try an escape room, and we thought making a Yuuri-themed one would be fun.”

“Wasn’t fun for me,” mutters Yuri, but neither Phichit nor Christophe answer that.

“You know, for a moment I thought everything was real,” Yuuri says, gesturing back into the room with all of the flowers. “But everyone else cared more about the puzzles than getting out. That was… really confusing, actually. Did no one bother telling me it was just an escape room?”

“No, we told you,” says Christophe, grinning. “You probably forgot about it, though? It was at the bar, before we came here.”

“Where _is_ here, anyway?” Yuuri wonders. He looks towards Viktor, who shrugs.

“We were all blindfolded,” he explains. “But I think Phichit said he’d gotten some film set that his uncle was using? Am I right about that?”

Phichit nods. “My uncle just wrapped a thriller movie, but he hadn’t taken down the set yet. We just added our own touches.”

Yuuri rolls his eyes. “I should’ve known from the weird cut-and-paste love letter,” he mutters.

“Well, _you_ insisted on pregaming for this,” replies Phichit, referring, of course, to the time-honoured tradition of getting drunk prior to a game so that the lack of filter or fear helps one enjoy oneself. Usually the ‘game’ in the traditional sense refers to a sports event of some sort, where the only people who actually enjoy themselves are the winning athletes and the drunkest spectators, but in this sense the ‘game’, of course, refers to ‘lock Yuuri Katsuki up in a room full of puzzles and get him to escape in under an hour’. “We’d have intervened if you hurt yourself, if that makes you feel any better?”

Yuri rolls his eyes. “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Phichit claps him on the back. “That’s the spirit!” he says cheerily. “Besides, did you guys figure it out? Who the kidnapper was?”

Yuuri looks at Viktor, who beams. “ _Elementary_ , my dear Phichit,” he declares. “I know precisely who the kidnapper is.”

“You know Sherlock Holmes never said that, right?” asks Christophe.

“I still know who did it,” replies Viktor, and winks. Yuuri sighs, rubbing at his temples.

“I don’t really care who did it,” he says. “I just want another drink.”

“Maybe you should go to bed,” insists Viktor, putting an arm around him. “You’ve probably had a very confusing night.”

Yuuri yawns. Now that Viktor mentions it, the exhaustion does, in fact, seem to be lurking just behind his eyeballs, ready to pull closed his eyelids at any moment. He shifts and leans his head on Viktor’s shoulder, yawning widely.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “Perhaps.”

He’ll dream of getting his revenge tonight, involving a cold serving platter, a bottle of orange hair dye, and a cactus.

And his darling fiancé won’t know what hit him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [LinneaKou](http://linneakou.tumblr.com/) and [exile-wrath](http://exile-wrath.tumblr.com/) for beta-reading!
> 
> This was a commission for [ayabai](https://ayabai.tumblr.com/), who wanted Chris to trick Yuuri, Viktor, Yurio, and Otabek into doing an escape room of some sort. I added in some Phichit and the... [eerily familiar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13749462) scenario. 
> 
> Additional thanks to the Puzzle Room in my hometown for giving me an excellent escape room experience so that I could realistically write about one ;) 
> 
> Feel free to comment with the answers to the puzzles, if you could solve them! Bonus for figuring out who each of the suspects are.
> 
> Scream about Viktuuri with me on [Tumblr!](https://omgkatsudonplease.tumblr.com/)


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